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Flock – Chilling Effects: Long Island's Emerging Open-Air Prison(11971.com)
73 points by mediaeater a day ago | 33 comments
Tempest1981 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The list includes a school district near Syracuse, a casino's tribal police force in Connecticut, the Fort Worth, Texas police department 1,600 miles away, and Home Depot Corporation, a private company

Can any private corporation request/buy access? Or is Home Depot special?

Found this: https://corporate.homedepot.com/page/immigration-activity-ou...

ratmice 13 hours ago | parent [-]

> We do not grant access to our license plate readers to federal law enforcement.

That sounds very weasel worded, if they get license plate readers from someone who does.

kotaKat 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Bingo. Local cop goes in, buddy-buddys with the loss prevention manager, gets access to run plates for the immigration folks outside. "Professional courtesy" strikes again!

dredmorbius a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Site fails to load without one heck of a lot of uMatrix unblocking.

mediaeater 21 hours ago | parent [-]

The joy of Google sites, page itself, makes zero external requests, the container not so much - will deploy elsewhere.

nicbou 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Bear Blog maybe?

dredmorbius 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks!

downrightmike 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"The Supreme Court held in Carpenter v. United States that the government may not track the whole of a person's movements without a warrant. This system tracks the whole of everyone's movements, every day, and no warrant is ever asked. "

~94,000 Cameras in the national Flock network that Southold officers had access to, never disclosed to the Town Board

0 Opt-in or opt-out decisions the Town made about any of this sharing, in its own words

a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]
[deleted]
20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]
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know-how 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

rmnoflock 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

crises-luff-6b 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

mannanj 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

dropping here, again:

- Montana vehicle registrations give you privacy

- are not tax evasion, those straw mans and ad hominems are to scare you into giving away your privacy protections

- you can pay use tax still (consult a professional, I'm no attorney)

That will speak louder to your representatives who are voting in these cameras which violate your privacy.

BTW officials in California, Texas have a history of selling your persona info tied to your vehicle registrations to 3rd policies and have been fined before. Trust them to have changed? Hah.

bikezen 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is not legal in California. If you are a resident in California you need California plates/registration. Even if you're a non-resident you need to register it here within a short period of time.

> Except as provided in Section 6700, 6702, and 6703, any vehicle which is registered to a nonresident owner, and which is based in California or primarily used on California highways, shall be registered in California.

mannanj 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The LLC’s ownership and Montana registration are not inherently tax evasion.

The appropriate party can pay California or New York use tax arising from the vehicle’s in-state use. Whether Montana registration may legally remain or California requires a registration from you for a vehicle you do not own is a separate question. Generally, the LLC registers it. Since this vehicle has had its use tax already paid, the tax evasion argument won't apply.

Now is vehicle registration evasion a real thing or something you made up to conflate your fear mongering with legality?

onetokeoverthe 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

asdfasgasdgasdg 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

NY VTL § 250(1) says otherwise.

mannanj 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The LLC’s ownership and Montana registration are not inherently tax evasion.

The appropriate party can pay California or New York use tax arising from the vehicle’s in-state use. Whether Montana registration may legally remain or California requires a registration from you for a vehicle you do not own is a separate question. Generally, the LLC registers it. Since this vehicle has had its use tax already paid, the tax evasion argument won't apply.

asdfasgasdgasdg 15 hours ago | parent [-]

I don’t think a shell LLC is gonna help you avoid the requirement to register a car you own as a New York resident. The law in New York requires that for the vehicle to be considered non-resident it be garaged at the out-of-state place of business. Taxes are irrelevant.

kelseyfrog 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Is this legal advice?

nullc 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Care to explain how you can insure a car without the insurance selling your data to data brokers? All states with remotely private registration still require insurance, including Montana.

mannanj 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure. Insurance isn't asking for your vehicle registration though, and is not even getting your license plate. You are not being tracked by flock cameras and your license plate linked to your identity through your insurance registration.

You are though, through your state registration at the DMV.

Unless, of course, you have Montana registrations.

nullc 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Insurance demands your vin and reports it to LexisNexis, and anyone with a Lexis Nexis account can turn a VIN into a Montana plate so long as they self-certify that their use complies with the DPPA (which includes enough reasons to drive two busses through, even if you want to assume bad actors don't lie).

know-how 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

phendrenad2 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The flock discourse is slowly climbing the ladder to real discussion. We're at the "mostly intelligent people who are casually interested in the topic being confidently wrong about it" phase (and I know I'm going to get very angry replies accusing me of being one, hah caught you thinking about it!)

> log every trip

> This system tracks the whole of everyone's movements, every day

Funny, because current lawsuits over flock have hinged on the point that they DO NOT have total coverage of roads. Author seems to be talking about Long Island, which is an unusual case, and flock might have total coverage there. But special places need special laws, and an edge case isn't the model for the whole world!

> The Supreme Court held in Carpenter v. United States that the government may not track the whole of a person's movements without a warrant.

No, that court case established that the government needs a warrant to get, specifically, historical cellphone pings from a 3rd party (the cellphone companies).

And overly-emotional language to fool the more credulous:

> It is called Flock for a reason. We are sheep only if we let this happen

Oh please, it's named flock because it's perched on a pole, like a bird, not a sheep.

> feed a national database searched by 59 outside agencies nobody in this town chose

> 0: Opt-in or opt-out decisions the Town made about any of this sharing, in its own words

Well why not? It seems like a lot of the flock discussion takes a bizarre twist where people go "It's useless to try to limit it, we need to ban it outright". Like okay? Do we ban the police when one goes rogue? (I guess that's kind of a bad question to ask, given that "defund the police" was trending a few years ago)

zenapollo 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Bad faith argument, borderline flaggable. But I’ll bite. Do you not see any issue with mass surveillance of people’s movements?

I’m an American living in Turkey at the moment. My airbnb host tells me that as a white collar software guy, he personally knows a large fraction of people who have been detained in prison for 1,2 or 3 months for having parties or fake traffic violations.

Of course i don’t love the ever-tightening shackles of algorithmic pricing, which is already well in place for insurance, finance and banking.

But the situation in Turkey reminds me that we are only one “national emergency” away from your freedoms being ripped from us with zero recourse. The chilling effect here is real.

The casually interested, confidently wrong argument can be summed up pretty easily. There is a risk v reward calculation with mass surveillance. What’s the reward? I don’t know the details, but apparently police love the tech because it makes catching bad guys easier. What’s the risk? Unfathomably and Immeasurably high, in ways that we won’t always get to know, or find out years later.

Any refutation of said high risk argument should be something like “relax, guy!” The corporations and state authorities are never gonna use their surveillance of innocents in ways that have any real consequences.

phendrenad2 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> Bad faith argument, borderline flaggable

Do what you have to do. shrug But when it doesn't have any effect, consider that maybe your bar for "bad faith argument" includes large swaths of completely legitimate differing opinions.

titanomachy 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You’re responding as if those phrases were intentionally chosen, rather than the stochastic slop that they are.

StanislavPetrov 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>No, that court case established that the government needs a warrant to get, specifically, historical cellphone pings from a 3rd party (the cellphone companies).

Flock is gathering far, far more intrusive data than "cellphone pings" including hoovering up bluetooth signals and other identifying information. The court may not have ruled on it yet, but it is absurd to think that the courts would think that the government needs a warrant to collect cellphone pings but doesn't need a warrant to collect far more blanket data, including facial recognition on a mass scale. Hopefully we will get a ruling on this sooner rather than later.

>Well why not? It seems like a lot of the flock discussion takes a bizarre twist where people go "It's useless to try to limit it, we need to ban it outright". Like okay? Do we ban the police when one goes rogue? (I guess that's kind of a bad question to ask, given that "defund the police" was trending a few years ago)

This is a bizarre take. Police are a necessary component for running a society. Blanket surveillance is not. This is self-evidently true because society still functioned before the recent past when they introduced blanket surveillance. Equating, or even comparing, a core and necessary function of society, like policing, with a new and completely optional and unnecessary blanket surveillance system is absurd (and that's the polite term).

protocolture 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>Do we ban the police when one goes rogue?

I mean worth a shot right? Do we need armed government funded domestic violence perpetrators? Can anyone make the case for the current situation from first principles?

phendrenad2 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Thank you, I'm upvoting you, because people need to realize that there's no discussing this issue. We probably need to return to state's rights and ask everyone to move to their preferred state based on if they're crypto-anarchists or believe that some government is okay.

vietmin3 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

T